Post your idiot spare time projects. i'm the subtle buttocks

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > Post your idiot spare time projects. i'm the subtle buttocks

«‹›484 »

Star War Sex Parrot: Oct 2, 2003

BobHoward posted:

SHAME

real ballers grab a used metcal station off ebay

same, except work just let me take an extra home

# ? Jul 12, 2017 23:24

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# ? Apr 25, 2024 20:09

Bloody: Mar 3, 2013

lol if you dont just buy aoyue crap

# ? Jul 12, 2017 23:47

Raluek: Nov 3, 2006; WUT.

BobHoward posted:

SHAME

real ballers grab a used metcal station off ebay

same except from the local surplus electronics store

# ? Jul 12, 2017 23:50

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

the hakko 936 is the thinking man's weller 51. an elegant soldering station for a more civilized age

# ? Jul 12, 2017 23:52

peepsalot: Apr 24, 2007; ��PEEP THIS...
��BITCH!

just lol if you can't play tetris on your soldering iron
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Buzew1z1AhQ

get with the times you gramposaurs

# ? Jul 12, 2017 23:57

Raluek: Nov 3, 2006; WUT.

Sagebrush posted:

the hakko 936 is the thinking man's weller 51. an elegant soldering station for a more civilized age

playskool babby's first iron

# ? Jul 13, 2017 00:02

Olivil: Jul 15, 2010; Wow I'd like to be as smart as a computer

Raluek posted:

playskool babby's first iron

no thats the hakko 888

# ? Jul 13, 2017 00:04

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

the 936 is sleek and black and rectilinear, like a bauhaus fountain pen

# ? Jul 13, 2017 00:15

Doc Block: Apr 15, 2003; Fun Shoe

Olivil posted:

no thats the hakko 888

I love my soldering iron that looks like a rejected SGI design from the 90s

# ? Jul 13, 2017 00:21

BobHoward: Feb 13, 2012; The only thing white people deserve is a bullet to their empty skull

Sagebrush posted:

the 936 is sleek and black and rectilinear, like a bauhaus fountain pen

the metcal mx500 is a black monolith sent by the gods to fill us with awe

# ? Jul 13, 2017 09:14

Silver Alicorn: Mar 30, 2008; 𝓪 𝓻𝓮𝓭 𝓹𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓪 𝓲𝓼 𝓪 𝓬𝓾𝓻𝓲𝓸𝓾𝓼 𝓼𝓸𝓻𝓽 𝓸𝓯 𝓬𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓽𝓾𝓻𝓮

I need to put down the video games for a while and pick up an idiot spare time project. any suggestions? I do not presently have a soldering station tho

# ? Jul 13, 2017 13:48

muckswirler: Oct 22, 2008

xoxbox?

# ? Jul 13, 2017 15:59

Silver Alicorn: Mar 30, 2008; 𝓪 𝓻𝓮𝓭 𝓹𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓪 𝓲𝓼 𝓪 𝓬𝓾𝓻𝓲𝓸𝓾𝓼 𝓼𝓸𝓻𝓽 𝓸𝓯 𝓬𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓽𝓾𝓻𝓮

hm don't have any midi controllers but I should look into getting one for my y2k pc

# ? Jul 13, 2017 16:34

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

write a Macintosh program like me

# ? Jul 13, 2017 16:35

Glorgnole: Oct 23, 2012

Silver Alicorn posted:

I need to put down the video games for a while and pick up an idiot spare time project. any suggestions? I do not presently have a soldering station tho

take up plein air oil painting, op

# ? Jul 13, 2017 16:49

LP0 ON FIRE: Jan 25, 2006; _{beep boop}

aww yes, my yospos now has a background color gradient

still messin around

code:

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# ? Jul 13, 2017 16:58

longview: Dec 25, 2006; heh.

playing around with some neopixel strips, i worked out how to drive them using a hardware SPI controller instead of the bit banging solution most libraries use.

to recap, the strips use a self clocking signal where the duty cycle defines 1/0, around 30-45% is 0 and 55-70% or so is 1

not clocking the bus for about 9 �s or more causes a bus reset that latches the data. the bus speed is not extremely tight but must be stable (approx 800 kHz)

using some strategic time delay elements it's possible to take a standard SPI signal, generate a 90 degree shifted clock, a stretched in-phase clock, and a slightly time delayed data signal.
a quad nand gate then implements some combinational logic that generates the final output signal

basically the 0 state is a short pulse, generated from the combination of clock AND NOT quadrature clock
the 1 state is the 0 state + some more on-time, so the 1 state output is the delayed data AND the time streched in-phase clock
those two are logically ORed to generate the final output
entire solution requires 6 inverters and 4 NAND gates, along with 4 R-C filters

real hardware logic trace tested with an STM32F103:

top is the output; the 0 state is SCK AND NOT SCK_Q
the 1 pulse is the 0-state ORed with (D_D (data delayed) AND S_D (SCK_delayed, the stretched clock).
the data delay in this shot is a little much, but just small enough that no glitches show up

the big reason to do this is because it's a fun challenge but also because the bit-banging requires interrupts to be disabled a lot on the MCU. the MCUs I'm targeting are guaranteed to have hardware SPI with DMA so with this setup the entire strip can be updated with no extra RAM usage and without interfering with other peripherals.
with an extra gate or two it could even have a chip select, but most MCUs have a spare SPI so not really necessary.

the strips will not run if the duty cycle of a 1-state is 50%, if they could accept 25/50% as 1/0 then the pulse stretcher and data delay could be removed.

# ? Jul 13, 2017 17:49

Pile Of Garbage: May 28, 2007

bigclivedotcom is that you?

nah but seriously, awesome stuff!@

# ? Jul 13, 2017 18:26

longview: Dec 25, 2006; heh.

obviously you could just encode the data as triplets instead of bits and DMA that at 3x the speed (which someone else already wrote code to do)

but that requires at least 3x the ram, and probably 4x if you need a frame buffer to work on, and the encoding process takes some time too. for very large strips that can add up, for my 300 led strip that's 900 bytes for a full RGB frame buffer vs. 3600 bytes for an RGB buffer + the DMA buffer.

running it on a STM32F030 with 4k of RAM that makes a big difference!

# ? Jul 13, 2017 20:20

LP0 ON FIRE: Jan 25, 2006; _{beep boop}

i like how you worked out having different duty cycles. everyone seems to disregard that when messing with waves

# ? Jul 13, 2017 20:37

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

you can buy SPI led strips (APA102) that are functionally identical to the neopixels (WS2812) in every way except the protocol

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2241

but that is still a v cool bit of reverse engineering

# ? Jul 13, 2017 21:41

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

i had a bit of fun with them but had to use a lookup table because their response was so far from linear it wasn't even funny.. ugh and dim colours were hosed. bright colours were fantastic but I always find with poo poo like that there seems to be orders of magnitude more difference in brightness between 0-1 and between like 100-255 or whatever. I dont see in theory why you cant drive them with such a low pwm that you can do a proper fade to black rather than to dim and then off with nothing inbtween. really hosed up my plans

# ? Jul 14, 2017 01:37

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

you can get pretty drat close to a linear fade-out if you just use a proper gamma table, which it sounds like you did, but yeah you're always gonna be limited by the resolution since most of these things only take 8 bits per color channel.

also the context matters. you can get a pretty good looking fade to nothing if you have the LEDs running in a regular room with the lights on, and you're comparing it to the ambient level. but in the darkness, where only the LEDs are showing, your eyes are super sensitive. there's research that suggests that people can detect a single photon when they're properly accommodated for the dark. that level of control is asking too much of a 10 cent LED imo

# ? Jul 14, 2017 02:20

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

some interesting facts no doubt

how hard would it be to increase the resolution? is there a practical limit to how fast you can PWM?

# ? Jul 14, 2017 03:11

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

if it's an rgb-on-a-chip like the WS2812 or APA102, you can't change the pwm frequency -- it's all done onboard. you send 24 bits of color data and the LED does the rest. so even if the frequency technically allows you to have better than 1/256 resolution, you can't change it. iirc the pwm frequency on the neopixels is around 100khz, which at 8 bits of resolution means a 50% duty cycle period would be like ~400hz.

if you're doing it yourself with discrete diodes, then the hard limit i guess would be the minimum transition time for the LED itself, which is gonna be nanoseconds. pwm of a few megahertz wouldn't be hard to achieve

(note that this would only work for colored diodes -- white ones use a blue LED to excite a white phosphor, and while the phosphor turns on instantly, it has a noticeable fade-out time, like an incandescent bulb)

Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Jul 14, 2017

# ? Jul 14, 2017 03:22

echinopsis: Apr 13, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

the phosphor effect would be beneficial no??

cool

# ? Jul 14, 2017 04:09

longview: Dec 25, 2006; heh.

Sagebrush posted:

you can buy SPI led strips (APA102) that are functionally identical to the neopixels (WS2812) in every way except the protocol

neopixels have some really big advantages though, namely a) cheap and b) non-expensiveness. my 5m roll was like $25 with 60 leds/m

echinopsis posted:

some interesting facts no doubt

how hard would it be to increase the resolution? is there a practical limit to how fast you can PWM?

the fastled library includes temporal dithering by default, i tried it and it definitely helped but there are limits.
it could work well for short strings (or say a bunch of shorter pieces in parallel) since the string write-time goes down and more dither-updates can be squeezed in per second, giving more resolution.

it also has nice colour modes and can apply a colour correction to all your LEDs which is pretty nice, helps keep them approximately neutral white instead of completely blue-white.

with correction on it does generate a bit of colour casting through the brightness range, especially for very low intensities. a better dither could help in theory but if that's a major issue then really you just need a higher resolution chip.

# ? Jul 14, 2017 06:14

klen dool: May 7, 2007; Okay well me being wrong in some limited situations doesn't change my overall point.

Silver Alicorn posted:

I need to put down the video games for a while and pick up an idiot spare time project. any suggestions? I do not presently have a soldering station tho

You could build yourself a soldering station.

# ? Jul 14, 2017 09:05

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

LP0 ON FIRE posted:

aww yes, my yospos now has a background color gradient

still messin around

code:

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user scripts own

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# ? Jul 14, 2017 11:12

LP0 ON FIRE: Jan 25, 2006; _{beep boop}

Wheany posted:

user scripts own

code:


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// @namespace   qq
// @description improves discussion in YOSPOS
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noice

LP0 ON FIRE fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Jul 14, 2017

# ? Jul 14, 2017 14:15

Trig Discipline: Jun 3, 2008; Please leave the room if you think this might offend you.; Grimey Drawer

the most idiot project of all time award goes to

https://soundcloud.com/danwarren/yakety-sad

# ? Jul 15, 2017 08:47

Doc Block: Apr 15, 2003; Fun Shoe

not all that impressive, but nifty looking. made a little visual debugger for a quadtree game level splitter/merger. the idea is it will take the tiled game level, merge identical areas into chunks that are efficient for visibility testing & rendering.

Doc Block fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Jul 23, 2017

# ? Jul 23, 2017 04:47

Silver Alicorn: Mar 30, 2008; 𝓪 𝓻𝓮𝓭 𝓹𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓪 𝓲𝓼 𝓪 𝓬𝓾𝓻𝓲𝓸𝓾𝓼 𝓼𝓸𝓻𝓽 𝓸𝓯 𝓬𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓽𝓾𝓻𝓮

guess I'll get back into classic Atari programming... where did I leave my mac/65 disks...

# ? Jul 24, 2017 01:56

moron izzard: Nov 17, 2006; Grimey Drawer

is there an OS that support 1k+ controller inputs across 1 or more hid devices

# ? Jul 24, 2017 02:13

Cocoa Crispies: Jul 20, 2001; Vehicular Manslaughter!; Pillbug

moron izzard posted:

is there an OS that support 1k+ controller inputs across 1 or more hid devices

like >1000 keyboard buttons?

# ? Jul 24, 2017 02:23

moron izzard: Nov 17, 2006; Grimey Drawer

any digital input really. 1000 unique inputs you could pick up in like a Unity engine game. There was someone who made a 100 button controller for an install this week at the Gallery Hop and mentioned in passing that they wanted to scale it up.

moron izzard fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Jul 24, 2017

# ? Jul 24, 2017 02:24